SACW - 8 Oct 2012 | Bangladesh: Identity question / Nepal: Truth and memory / Sri Lanka: Appeal on Education Crisis / India: secular - religious republic; modernism; Islamic science; regional chauvinism / USA: Creationism

[Harsh Kapoor]

    South Asia Citizens Wire - 8 Oct 2012 - No. 2755
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Contents:

1. Bangladesh: A Question of Identity (Sushmita S Preetha)
2. Nepal: Truth and memory (Ram Kumar Bhandari)
3. An Appeal to Address the Education Crisis in Sri Lanka - Academics and scholars
4. Rise of Buddhist Extremism in Sri Lanka and Response of Sri Lankan Muslims (Raashid Riza)
5. Brief History of India - A secular republic founded on a religious metaphor (Ashok Mitra)
6. India: Using hate to challenge modernism (Praveen Swami)
7. ‘Islamic science is a creation of Euro-American universities’ - interview with S Irfan Habib
8. India: Does art have boundaries? (Vatsala Vedantam)

International: 
9. USA: What's the Matter With Creationism? (Katha Pollitt)  
  
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1. BANGLADESH: A QUESTION OF IDENTITY
by Sushmita S Preetha
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(The Star / The Daily Star, October 05, 2012)

It bewilders me, frustrates me, saddens me, but more than anything, it angers me. How can it be that in a state that claims to be secular, our minorities are subjected to such atrocious and malicious acts of violence? Only a few days ago, violence erupted in Rangamati and nearby areas after a clash between a Bengali and indigenous student of Rangamati Government College. Systematic attacks were carried out on the already-oppressed indigenous population of the region, in plain view of members of law enforcement agencies.

Even before the flames of that fire could die down, thousands of rioters attacked the Buddhist population in Cox's Bazar, torching and looting Buddhist temples, innumerable homes and hundreds of years of history in what is now considered one of the worst cases of communal violence in the country. The protesters gathered, apparently, to protest a derogatory image of the Quran on Facebook posted by a Buddhist youth. It was later found that he had been tagged in the picture by a group called “Insult Islam” and had played no part in actually posting the picture.

It is beyond me how, in a country that has less than 0.2 percent Facebook users, a tagged picture can give rise to such irreparable and reprehensible damage to a community and to the nation as a whole. For argument's sake, let's assume that the said youth was actually responsible for posting a derogatory image on the Internet; even then, is there any justification for deliberately targeting and attacking an entire community -- its history, heritage and people -- over the imprudent action of one individual?

But that is really a moot point now. From what we know already, it is clear that the attacks were not spontaneous reactions to an image, but rather actions that were meticulously planned and executed. Thousands of rioters gathered at night, chanting anti-Buddhist insults and slogans, with machetes, sticks, iron rods and tomahawk. They ransacked every home in the Buddhist neighbourhood in Ramu, leaving the Muslim houses unscathed. The attackers knew exactly who they wanted to target. They not only demolished the homes of the Buddhists, and along with that their dreams and any sense of security, but they also ruthlessly violated the Buddhist's scared place of worship: their monasteries and temples. They set fire to pagodas, statues and scriptures, effectively destroying the communal harmony that has existed for years between Buddhists and Muslims.
  	
 We hear they arrived in trucks, hundreds and hundreds of them, and carried out the attacks in the dead of night. The police just stood back and watched; there was nothing we could do, they say, with only 10-12 personnel on duty that night, to stop 10,000 angry people. We asked them to stop, but they didn't listen, they meekly offer as an excuse -- the same force that, in a different time and place, wouldn't think twice before attacking, with batons and tear gas, peaceful protesters demanding justice or an end to price hikes of electricity.

In Rangamati, too, the law enforcement agencies did very little to control the damages caused to the indigenous communities. Their inaction was so blatantly visible that even the government couldn't deny it. Rashed Khan Menon, MP and chair of the parliamentary caucus on indigenous affairs, even admitted that security forces, “especially the army, were linked with this.” Not a surprising revelation, of course, to those aware of the long history of oppression in the Hill Tracts region; over the years, the army has played an instrumental role in establishing the hegemony of Bengalis in the region, actively engaging in land grabbing, torture and killings of indigenous people and rape and harassment of their women.

Does it matter which party is in power? To some extent, it does. After all, the two parties' philosophies regarding minorities vary greatly -- at least as far as public discourses are concerned. One of them has close links with groups that foster communal mistrust and religious fundamentalism; the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) clearly privileges Islam over secularism in its conceptualisation of Bangladeshi nationalism. However, it would be simplistic to assume that the Awami League (AL) always has the best interests of minorities in mind. After all, both the parties have used minorities for their own political agendas, albeit in different ways and in different degrees. State-sanctioned violence in the Hill Tracts has occurred under both regimes, as have systematic persecution of Hindus, especially in regards to vested properties.

Marginalisation and manipulation of our minorities are neither new concepts nor recent practices. We might have had secularism as one of the pillars of the Constitution, but even Bangabandhu himself made considerable concessions to safeguard the interests of the majority at substantial cost to our minorities. The two military dictators, General Ziaur Rahman and General H.M. Ershad further solidified this practice of using Islam to legitimise their positions in power, and thus began a gradual but consistent process of de-secularisation in Bangladesh. Secularism was dropped by Zia from the Constitution, to be replaced by the words, “Absolute trust and faith in the Almighty Allah shall be the basis of all action.” Ershad declared Islam as the state religion during his regime.

Even the mouth-piece of so-called secular politics, the AL, couldn't quite bring itself to install secularism as one of the fundamental pillars of the Constitution when it came to power. Fearing that it would lose the sympathy of Muslim voters, it agreed to have Islam as the state religion... yes, of a secular country. The irony is obvious to all, except to those making the decisions.

Coming back to the present (as if you can ever really separate the past from it), it is interesting to see how the two parties are approaching the communal riot. In typical fashion, they are pointing fingers towards each other in their show of self-righteous indignation! Will there be a fair probe into the matter and perpetrators brought to justice? Not if history teaches us anything. But it is imperative that a judicial enquiry be formed immediately before the recent incidents become yet another pawn in the two parties' electoral campaign.

How difficult can it be to identify the perpetrators, thousands and thousands of them, if we really put our mind to it? How is it that no one -- Bengalis or Buddhists in the area alike -- is willing to name the attackers or organisers? Were there no recognisable faces? Are the local people really so oblivious of what went on that night, or are they afraid to talk for fear of backlash? What was the attackers' relationship to people in positions of power? On a broader level, we must ask ourselves what the implications are of this attack on the country's quasi-secular status, and how we, as citizens, are complicit in this process of de-secularisation (and conversely, what we can do to counter it). These questions must be addressed without delay if we want to retain some shreds of a secular identity.

[also available at: http://www.sacw.net/article2901.html]

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3. Nepal: Truth and memory
by Ram Kumar Bhandari
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(Nepali Times, 05 - 11 Oct 2012)

One of the buzzwords of Nepal's prolonged peace process is 'transitional justice'. But most people, even victims of conflict violence and their relatives, do not understand exactly what it means.

But after six years, most relatives of victims know they want more than just a token compensation amount: they want to know the truth, and they want acknowledgement from the state about why it happened. They are realistic enough not to expect justice right away.

At a recent conference in India on Asian Sites of Conscience on Transitional Justice, Nepali participants like me were forced to relive the memories of the relatives who were killed or disappeared during the conflict. How we can connect the past to present, and convert memory into action? What happens to a family that loses a member? How is it different when the relative has been disappeared? How do people cope with that loss or ambiguity, and move on? How do they feel when they do not get a response or recognition by the state?

There are many sites in Nepal where citizens were illegally detained, disappeared, tortured or killed in army barracks, in police custody, in village squares, school playgrounds, in forests. We have not been able to link past violence with the sites because in many cases we don't have access to them.

There is no systematic archiving process, and many of the evidence are either forgotten or being obliterated. The state is in denial mode, and has tried to push through an ordinance on the formation of a Truth and Reconciliation Commission that would pardon perpetrators, and gloss over their crimes. There is collusion between the former state and the former rebels because both are now in the administration.

This is the reason that the government has never made a move to support the establishment of 'memory places' and to create a space for dialogue not only to the victims' community, but for general public to respect their legacies.
Cambodia established the Tuol Sleng museum at a lycee in Phnom Penh where thousands of people were tortured and executed during the Khmer Rouge genocide. In Bangladesh, a pit where the bodies of massacre victims were dumped in 1971 is now a small museum.

The objective of identifying historic sites is to locate the places of detainment, enforced disappearances, and killings, and to create historic structures that preserve both visual and narrative memorials showing the suffering of people.

Memorials can speak about the past and show younger generations how such incidents happened and why they must not be repeated. More important of all, they keep the issue of truth and justice alive. Once we establish truth and public memory, society can move further peacefully in a respectful way, with no sense of revenge.

Reviving public memory and revealing truth automatically generates a certain moral ground for justice in a post-conflict environment. The continuous denial of justice and the politics of memory in Nepal have created a vacuum for truth-seeking and the justice process. Political parties have cynically manipulated truth and justice, applied it selectively, or have tried to sweep past crimes under the carpet.

For example, the ruling Maoist party is creating several memorial gates only for victims of state violence, such memorials do not create peace, tolerance, and reconciliation and instead glorify violence and politicise the cult of martyrdom.

On the other hand, the army and police bases that became infamous centres for detention, torture and executions like the Bhairabnath Battalion on Lazimpat road, Charali Barracks in Jhapa, the Chisapani Barracks in Bardiya are out of bounds. Scenes of massacres and terrorism, like Doramba in Ramechhap and Madi in Chitwan, will have memorials, but erected by one side or the other.

Fortunately, women groups made up of relatives of victims who suffered at the hands of both sides have got together in many places to create peace memorials, plant trees, and collect testimonials. Like with a lot of areas in Nepal, communities have stepped in where the national government has dragged its feet.

The people have forgotten their past enmity and shunned vengeance to work for truth and reconciliation by remembering. The politicians could learn from them.

Ram Kumar Bhandari, whose father was disappeared in 2001, is a human rights activist and chair of the National Network of Families of Disappeared and Missing (NEFAD)

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3. AN APPEAL TO ADDRESS THE EDUCATION CRISIS IN SRI LANKA
- Academics and scholars
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(sacw.net - 7 October 2012)

We, as economists, academics and social activists are deeply concerned about the continuing crisis in the education sector in Sri Lanka. Austerity measures and attacks on social welfare in many countries have been disenfranchising children and youth from education as a central avenue for social equity. This has led to protests and social unrest in many countries across the board.

In decades past, we saw social and human development with free education and health in Sri Lanka, to be a model worthy of emulation by other countries. But insurrections, civil war, increasing militarisation and authoritarianism over the years, have made a deep dent in the democratic structure of society.

Today, in the post war era in Sri Lanka, we look to the country to rebuild its social foundations that would serve to democratise and further improve the quality of life for people. Investing in a robust education system, as is well known, will leave an indelible mark on this rebuilding process.

However, to the contrary, investment in education has been decreasing to where state expenditure in education is now 1.86% of the GDP; the lowest in South Asia and one of the lowest in the world. Such drastic declines in state investment are related to the mounting issues in the education sector in Sri Lanka. This crisis is compounded by reports of rural school closures, problems in schools and university entrance exams and the politicisation and militarisation of the education space. [. . .].

FULL TEXT HERE: http://www.sacw.net/article2900.html

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4. RISE OF BUDDHIST EXTREMISM IN SRI LANKA AND RESPONSE OF SRI LANKAN MUSLIMS
by Raashid Riza
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(dbsjeyaraj.com)

The last few months have seen a rapid increase in anti-Muslim sentiment amongst sections of the political class in Sri Lankan society. The situation has yet to deteriorate to the extent that the default image of a Sri Lankan Muslim is one represented by an anti- Sri Lankan or anti-Buddhist element. But the trend that is developing is truly alarming and surely points towards such an inaccurate mental image.

The rise of extremist Buddhists in Sri Lanka is truly disturbing and does not bode well to the sense of national resilience that the government is trying to foster, at least in its rhetoric.

There is to be a protest march in Colombo today that is supposedly against ‘Islamic Extremism’. The leaflet however, unable to find tangible examples of Islamic extremism in Sri Lanka, instead highlights international examples.

The leaflet was first tweeted by Groundviews and was then picked up by other bloggers. The language used in the leaflet is particularly confrontational and is written in jargon generously peppered with phrases such as ‘enough of being silent’ as a precursor to the more confrontational language that follows.

The leaflet speaks of numerous instances where it alleges that Islamic extremism has acted malevolently towards Buddhists and Buddhist holy sites in many parts of world, including in Burma, Thailand, Afghanistan and even the eastern parts of Sri Lanka. The leaflet is clearly designed to fuel the ignorance of the apolitical (usually innocent) Buddhists against the Muslims and is therefore composed of materials that are innate historical inaccuracies at best and factually vacuous at worst. It specifically refers to the recent incidents in the south of Bangladesh where there have been attacks on Buddhists by groups of Muslims. Of course nowhere is the ethnic cleansing of Rohingya Muslims by Buddhist extremists in adjacent Burma mentioned.

The last paragraph of this leaflet quite explicitly states something on the lines of; it is time to show that this (Sri Lanka) is a Buddhist country by word and deed; many have forgotten that this is a Buddhist country, this notion should be reawakened. Extremists should be struck down as they flee. When cruel Islamic extremists prey on other innocent Buddhists, and when the entire world remains silent in the wake of it, it is time that we reawaken our race (Sinhala Buddhists) to respond to this.

The implications of the call to “reawaken” invoked in this context is particularly disturbing.

Sri Lankan Muslims have absolutely nothing to do with the alleged crimes against Buddhists or Buddhist interests in Bangladesh. Similarly Sri Lankan Sinhalese and Buddhists have absolutely nothing to do with the heinous crimes committed against the Muslims of Burma.

What these Buddhist extremists seek to achieve for the alleged benefit of their Buddhist compatriots abroad remains to be seen. For Buddhists who feel that they are persecuted in other parts of the world, this exercise by minute sections of the Sri Lankan Buddhist community will be futile. Surely the Buddhist leadership in Sri Lanka is intelligent enough to grasp this fact. What exactly then does this exercise seek to achieve? The result of these sorts of protests (yes, plural, this is to be one of a series of protests) are multiple.

Sinhala – Muslim relations have always been cordial and strong. The current generation of Sri Lankans cannot easily be buoyed into buying an argument that Sri Lankan Muslims are a bane on the nation’s social fabric. Buddhism as a faith has thus far survived the vulture-esque assault by sections of a largely secular media that paints most religious faiths as violent, something that protests such as these threaten to undo.

Moreover, Sri Lanka is rebuilding itself as a nation after decades of conflict that not only curtailed and stunted growth but also damaged it. Creating an environment that will marginalise Muslims can sow the seeds of future conflict.

Yesterday, the All Ceylon Jamiyathul Ulema (ACJU), the main decision-making theological body for Sri Lankan Muslims, released a media communiqué condemning the attacks on Bangladeshi Buddhists. The wisdom of releasing this communiqué is certainly questionable.

Whether the ACJU has released statements for similar causes previously is anybody’s guess. There is no doubt that the body acted in the best interests of Sri Lankan Muslims and of Sri Lanka as a whole. Yet the timing or indeed decision to make such an overture seems hasty.

The despicable acts on Bangladeshi Buddhists have absolutely nothing to do with Sri Lankan Muslims. However, such a press release can create the impression amongst wider Sri Lankans of a sense of guilt amongst Sri Lankan Muslims when there is none due to there being no grounds for guilt.

Additionally, the release of such a statement can institutionalise the necessity to release communiqués almost every time a Buddhist place of worship is attacked anywhere in the World, thereby creating an undue burden of responsibility.

Elie Appelbaum of the York University in her research paper Extremism as a Strategic Tool in Conflicts argues –

“as a country becomes wealthier, more powerful, or more democratic, its level of extremism decreases, but at the same time, its rival’s level of extremism increases. Similarly, higher stakes in the conflict tend to increase the level of extremism in the relatively poorer, weaker, and less democratic country, but decrease the level of extremism in the other country. The countries can use extremism as a strategic tool in the conflict. The use of extremism is a double-edged sword: extremism provides a credible threat, but it also involves a risk. Similarly, when the countries are sufficiently asymmetric, higher stakes in the conflict tend to increase extremism in the country that is relatively poorer, weaker, or less democratic.”

Now, replace the word ‘countries’ with ‘communities’ in the paragraph above, and see how it reads. The roots of extremism rest in vested interests of various interest groups as much as it does on the absence of law & order and the socio-economic state of the parties in conflict. The Sri Lankan economy at the grassroots is in turmoil and the Sinhalese community, as the larger ethnic group, is the most affected.

An economically weak nation with near bankrupt sections of the public can foster groups that are represented by intellectually bankrupt individuals who posture as leaders at a local or national level patriotism for their ends. As Samuel Johnson wrote, “Patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel”. One only need observe a group of scoundrels against a group of self-confessed patriots to realise that there is too often much in common.

The 1915 riots are commonly known as the ‘Sinhala – Muslim’ riots, not by the name of individuals. The way in which the Sri Lankan Muslims react now will determine how history will testify for or against them. In the future, no matter what the political situation in Sri Lanka, the Muslim community will continue to exist in every strata of society.

Muslims in Sri Lanka are living in politically perilous times; they reside amongst a largely accommodative Sinhalese and Tamil population, apart from the odd elements that opportunistically seeks to whip up racial tensions. In the short term the Muslims should act prudently and actively within the framework of Sri Lankan law. They would do well to deal indifferently towards bankrupt extremism and not dignify it by seeking to confront it, except with a pragmatism that respects legal and constitutional norms.

In the long term they should be conscious that Sri Lankan Muslims are more tangible as a constituent element of Sri Lankan nationhood than a transient Buddhist extremism. The latter not only misrepresents Sri Lankan Buddhists at large but is against a unified vision of Sri Lankan nationhood

SEE ALSO:

Bangladesh embassy stoned during monks' protest
http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=2012\10\05\story_5-10-2012_pg14_6

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5. BRIEF HISTORY OF INDIA - A SECULAR REPUBLIC FOUNDED ON A RELIGIOUS METAPHOR
by Ashok Mitra
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http://www.sacw.net/article2903.html

Should the culpability for the original sin be pinned exclusively on Mahatma Gandhi? He, of course, chose the easy way out and used the religious metaphor to rouse the passion of millions of patently listless countrymen afflicted by the pangs of hunger and sunk in the deepest morass of ignorance: Ye and all please do gather the courage to join me, we shall together remove the foreign yoke. Once that task was accomplished, the bliss of Ram rajya was bound to descend on us. The concept of Ram rajya was, however, integral to the Hindu ethos. It was impossible to convince a starving, illiterate peasant that a Ram rajya was only an allegory or that it could function in a vacuum, without dependence on the fervour of Hinduism. A Muslim peasant, equally illiterate and equally suffering from the blight of hunger and malnutrition, could not but feel somewhat left out from the ambiance of Ram rajya.

Muslim leaders associating with the Indian National Congress during its early days, such as the Ali brothers or Dr Ansari, must have felt disturbed over the matter. For whatever reason, they chose to be polite, at least initially. There was one exception amongst them though, Mohammed Ali Jinnah. Not that Jinnah was not a liberal-minded gentleman with a catholicity of taste, including a weakness for ham sandwich in his spare hours. But his more pertinent identity was that of a practising politician and a leader of the Muslim community. Muslims, he was adamant in his assertion, could have no locus standi in Gandhi’s Ram rajya. The battle was joined; India’s political fate was also sealed at that fairly early juncture.

Before sending Mahatma Gandhi to, so to speak, the gallows, should we not consider the curious case of the first contingent of Bengali terrorists at the dawn of the last century? Was their culpability for the juxtaposition of political and religious issues any less? Both individual forays and action through collective ventures were the preferred modus operandi of these idealists in their war against foreign rulers. Before proceeding on a secret operation, it was obligatory for them to observe a standard ritual. They would seek the blessings of the goddess, Kali, and, at the same time, swear by the Gita or read evocative passages from Bankimchandra Chatterjee’s Anandamath.

This is no hearsay or lazy anecdote. Memoirs written in their later days by several of these revolutionaries meticulously describe the routine they followed. Quite a few scholars regard the Gita to be a breathtaking compendium of cynicism, lack of scruples and obiter dicta at high places. Maybe that controversy deserves to be shelved. Even so, the close association of this tract with Hindu religious practices can hardly be wished away. The preachings strewn across the Gita do not also quite convey anything approaching the grace and grandeur embedded in the Upanishads or the Vedas. Anyway, the choice of Anandamath, too, as an object of reverence by these dedicated groups of revolutionary youth plotting a fiery uprising against the British appears to be altogether odd. The message this historical fiction attempts to put across is that the British had arrived in India to deliver the Hindus from the tyrannical rule of the detestable Muslims; it was the sacred duty of all Hindus to welcome with open arms the benign foreigners from European shores.

No question the Gita and Anandamath-loving crowd of revolution-mongers exercised a major influence on the radical wing of the fledgling Indian National Congress in the opening decades of the 20th century. Call it misjudgment, or invest it with a more distilled epithet, some strange alchemy was the end-product. The ideological position of the Congress on the issue of secularism acquired a fuzziness that was never shaken off subsequently. World War II ended, British imperial power ebbed, the Congress leaders were itching to occupy the seats of power.

The British would agree to transfer power only if the terms arrived at via negotiations were satisfactory to the representatives of the minority community. Rather than share power with the cantankerous, constantly bickering Jinnah, both Jawaharlal Nehru and Vallabhbhai Patel preferred to accept the proposal of a truncated India. It was decided to divide the country along communal lines with a major chunk going out of the main corpus towards the dominion of Pakistan.

It is little use quibbling over spilt milk. Whether the Congress bosses should not have agreed to a constitutional arrangement, which, despite the presence of stipulations easily exploitable by troublemaking politicians, maintained the integrity of the country and adhered to secularism, is now an academic issue of zero practical significance. What is interesting though is that, while surrendering on the question of secular ideology during the pre- Independence parlays, those heading the new regime in New Delhi were nonetheless determined to build India as a republic secular to the core, where religiosity will have no place in governance.

With no Muslim League henceforth to interrupt the agenda, and the horrifying holocaust accompanying the Partition over, it was now daybreak for an independent India that would spell secularism. The new Constitution declared, with great éclat, the country to be a secular republic. What mattered, though, was the empirical correlate of the declaration. Under a secular dispensation, the State, one would have thought, will be totally indifferent to, and maintaining an equal distance from, all religions. What eventuated was nothing of the sort. The nation’s new leaders, with the prime minister donning the principal role, interpreted secularism to mean maintenance of equal proximity with each and every religion. The vibe went out that the State was not indifferent to religiosity; on the contrary, it reveres all religions and will protect the prerogative of a citizen to practise whatever religious faith he or she opts for. Jawaharlal Nehru put the seal of formal recognition on this meaning of secularism by constant rounds of temple-hopping, dutifully followed by constant hoppings of mosques, dargas, gurdwaras, churches, synagogues, et al.

Each of his descendants who have occupied the prime ministerial office has scrupulously copied the ritual. A number of developments, gestures and counter-gestures became part of a natural sequence, such as subsidy for the Amarnath trekkers being balanced by air-freighting haj pilgrims at the State’s cost. India, the hoity-toity secular republic, was rapidly transformed into a State that cares for, and encouraged, religious practices. Problems, however, did not disappear; in fact, they multiplied. Given the numerical preponderance of Hindus, temple-hopping by ministers got etched in the national consciousness, hopping of other ecclesiastical arenas did not have the same impact. Equally ominous was the introduction of out-and-out Hindu rituals like bhoomi puja and the breaking of a coconut as compulsory elements of official ceremonies. In this climate, it was child’s play for Hindu fundamentalists to appropriate the concept of Ram rajya for furthering their specific objective. They are now claiming, never mind Gandhi, to have established a Ram rajya in Gujarat, which has the stamp of religious intolerance all over.

It did not take long for the Great Indian Consensus to take shape. Rail against everything else under the sun, but for dear life stay away from attacking the institution of religion. India is a secular republic, but only in a special sense is it ‘religious-secular’. Everybody fell in line. Just look at the plight of the Left, which had started its innings with impeccable anti-sectarian credentials. There have been two states where it has wielded substantial influence. In Kerala, it had long fought blatantly communal formations entrenched in positions of privilege, but ultimately had to enter into an understanding with some of the same species it had so consistently opposed. In West Bengal, it was worse. A public holiday had to be declared by the Left Front regime on a date on which the world, according to a prediction published in a Hindu almanac, would come to an end. Small wonder that the Left came round to advocating ‘reservations’ in different spheres for disadvantaged sections of the minority community.

Once the belief gained ground that the State was the protector and defender of religious privileges, sectarian forces could not be blamed too much for thinking their kingdom had arrived. From the theme of ensuring religious rights to that of protecting caste interests is a very short interval to cover. Therefore, it is pointless to castigate the short-lived V.P. Singh regime or the Mandal Commission for the reservation mayhem that has been the dominating theme of India for the past couple of decades alongside economic liberalization. After all, for overwhelming numbers in different parts of the country, the identity of caste is no less important than the religion one belongs to; just check with a Yadav in Bihar or Uttar Pradesh.

On the theoretical plane, reservation can claim to cover anything and everything, including the list of the top 100 successful candidates in the All India Civil Service examination or that of the judges constituting the Supreme Court of India. It can be a ruthless means of conserving and extending the interests of any group that feels, or claims to feel, vulnerable.

Such is for now, in a nutshell, the story of post-Independent India.

[Also available at: http://www.sacw.net/article2903.html]

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6. INDIA: USING HATE TO CHALLENGE MODERNISM
by Praveen Swami
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(The Hindu, October 6, 2012)

The recent violence over an anti-Islam film is part of a wider clash with the idea of the modern republic

Last month, two men stood on a Mumbai sidewalk, holding up posters to a furious mob that was demanding a ban on a movie said to have blasphemed against the Prophet. The counter-protesters’ hand-written placards had some simple advice: “Don’t watch it”. For their pains, the men were threatened and then roughed up.

Familiar with the story? Probably not. The counter-protesters go by the name of Dileep D’Souza and Naresh Fernandes. The protesters were pious Bandra boys — not the Kalashnikov-waving Muslims who have ably helped television stations rake it in these past weeks. The film in question was Kamaal Dhamaal Malamaal, a Bollywood flop that appalled the faithful because, according to the Vatican news agency Agenzia Fides, “a priest is portrayed as a lottery maniac”. The church withdrew its objections after cuts were made; to no one’s surprise, the Mumbai Police hasn’t been falling over itself to prosecute the assailants.

Breakdown

India’s outrage industry has had a busy few weeks. The Shiromani Gurdwara Prabandhak Committee has threatened to seek a ban on Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling’s new book, which includes “a hairy man-woman” Sikh character. Hindu priest Rajan Zed, tireless in his pursuit of publicity, has held out dark warnings about Kevin Lima’s forthcoming Mumbai Musical, which tells the Ramayana from the point of view of monkeys.

Large swathes of tropical forest have been expended, in recent weeks, to printing commentary seeking to explain “Muslim rage” — the wave of anger that is purported to have gripped believers from North Africa to Indonesia, because of the release of the crude anti-Islam film, The Innocence of Muslims.

From an Indian optic, as this autumn’s epidemic outbreak of clerical madness demonstrates, it is far from clear that the problem is centred around either Muslims or rage. There is a far larger crisis unfolding in what used to be called the Third World, a breakdown of the modernist project that has empowered a variety of politics based around narrow ethnic and religious identities.

Perhaps the most interesting feature of “Muslim rage” is the absence of evidence that it exists; that is, as a force that shapes the political actions of believers, as opposed to a propagandistic tool useful to Islamic neoconservatives, anti-Islam bigots and confused liberals alike. The Innocence mobilisation was propelled, in each case, by reactionary politics, not spontaneous outrage. In Egypt, competition between establishmentarian and revolutionary Islamists, combined with anti-police hooliganism, fanned the riots; in Libya, warlords sought religious legitimacy; in Pakistan, the vanguard was made up of jihadists backed by the military establishment to undermine the civilian order. The bulk of the 23 people reported killed in Pakistan died at the hands of riot police; their targets in Karachi included liquor stores.

Yet, the Innocence violence is hardly exceptional. Ethnic and religious conflicts routinely claim a far larger toll of lives on a regular basis: Sri Lanka’s Buddhist chauvinists, Indian Hindutva groups, and African ethnic groups all have records rivalling the Islamists. Many of these movements have been as successful as the Islamists in transcending geography. The malaise cannot therefore be seen as something intrinsic to what is carelessly called “the Muslim world”; there are larger forces at work here.

In 2002, the British Marxist, Kenan Malik, shocked many with this proposition: “all cultures are not equal”. The real crisis flagged by 9/11, he argued, was not the rise of religious fundamentalism; it was instead growing liberal pessimism about the prospect of a better world. Mr. Malik argued that “scientific method, democratic politics, the concept of universal values — these are palpably better concepts than those that existed previously, or those that exist now in other political and cultural traditions”. These ideas, he went on, were “western”— but emerged there not “because Europeans are a superior people, but because out of the Renaissance, the Enlightenment and the scientific revolution flowed superior ideas.”

Post-colonial radicals of an earlier generation would, more likely than not, have been entirely comfortable with this argument. The radical C.L.R. James, Mr. Malik noted, condemned imperialism, but applauded “the learning and profound discoveries of [the] western civilisation.”

Frantz Fanon, despite his trenchant criticism of colonialism, conceded that “the elements of a solution to the great problems of humanity have, at different times, existed in European thought”.

Precisely these emancipatory ideas guided the great tide of change that swept nationalists to power across the world in the middle of the last century. In a magnificent speech now available online, Egypt’s former President Gamal Abdel Nasser recalled that the Muslim Brotherhood had offered peace in 1953 — if only the government made women wear the tarha, or headscarf. Nasser’s audience laughed uproariously at what then seemed surreal; “let him wear one”, a man shouted.

Begum Akbar Jehan Abdullah, the wife of the Kashmiri politician, Sheikh Muhammad Abdullah, urged women to leave purdah; her successors, like the People’s Democratic Party leader Mehbooba Mufti, cannot but seem to endorse it. Jawaharlal Nehru’s atheism; Dr. B.R. Ambedkar’s savage attacks on caste: these are almost inconceivable for a modern Indian politician.

No great insight is needed into why this retreat came apart — and the religious right became resurgent. Post-colonial societies have been through an extraordinary ripping-apart of their cultural fabric over the past century and more. “English steam and English free trade,” as Karl Marx noted in his now unfashionable but remarkable 1853 essay on colonial India, had produced a social revolution; post-colonial industrialisation and neoliberalism have accentuated it. In the context of countries like Egypt, Libya and Pakistan, authoritarianism, and its opportunistic alliances with religion, further de-legitimised the secular-nationalist project.

Large doses of metropolitan liberalism, as well as establishmentarian politicians, have confused the inequities of capitalism with the modernist project itself — thus legitimising, as scholars like Meera Nanda have pointed out, the worst kinds of political reaction which emerged out of the post-colonial crisis. Instead of building a political vocabulary based on citizenship, the republic degenerated into a series of political claims based on identity. Not giving offence to these identities was valorised as a means of engaging with the tide of hate washing across India. The defenders of M.F. Husain, for example, were compelled to argue that his paintings were deeply respectful of the Hindu tradition — not that he was entitled to offend who he chose.

Veto over intellectual life

Ever since the 1970s, Indian ethnic and religious reactionaries have thus come to enjoy a veto over India’s intellectual life. The Hindu’s Hasan Suroor has ably documented the huge volume of literature and knowledge, from Aubrey Menen’s Ramayana to James Laine’s Shivaji or the anonymously-authored al-Furqan al-Haqq. It is hard to imagine that a mainstream press would today publish a popular version of D.N. Jha’s work on beef-eating in Vedic India, or Maxime Rodinson’s speculations on the roots of prophetic revelation in epileptic disorders. Each of these acts of censorship represents an act of assault on critical inquiry.

The triumph of this vicious anti-politics has been to comprehensively shape our political imagination and language. There are closer affinities between the upmarket metropolitan liberals who coo over handicrafts and the aesthetic world of the communal terrorist than we care to acknowledge.

Lucius Seneca, the great stoic philosopher and statesman, spoke of the perils of the poisonous culture we find ourselves mired in. He pointed, wryly, to a populace which, “defending its own iniquity, pits itself against reason”. The relentless march of unreason, he went on, meant “a mistake that has been passed on from hand to hand finally involves us and works our destruction. It is the example of other people that is our undoing”.

India desperately needs a new modernist project — not the backward-looking search for authenticity which has so impoverished our public life. This ought to be the real lesson of the Innocence riots, though such reflection is improbable; there have been no shortage of opportunities to awake, and none of those was heeded.

[also available at: http://www.sacw.net/article2904.html]

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7. ‘ISLAMIC SCIENCE IS A CREATION OF EURO-AMERICAN UNIVERSITIES’ - INTERVIEW WITH S IRFAN HABIB
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(Tehelka, Vol 9, Issue 41, Dated 13 Oct 2012)

Q&A S Irfan Habib, Historian/Author

‘Islamic science is a creation of Euro-American universities’

THERE WAS a time when the Islamic world was at the forefront of scientific ideas and discoveries. Today, the narrative has been turned around to cast the religion as a hindrance to modernisation and free thought. In his new book Jihad or Ijtihad, historian of science S Irfan Habib, 59, examines the uncomfortable relationship between Islam and science. He tells Kunal Majumder why the two must co-exist.

Jihad Or Ijtihad
S Irfan Habib
HarperCollins
200 pp; Rs 299

EDITED EXCERPTS FROM AN INTERVIEW

Your book talks specifically about Islamic science. What made you choose the subject?
The book is a critique of ‘Islamic science’, which I find an exclusivist and essentialist project. There are people in the Euro-American universities who are trying to project a category called Islamic Science, which according to them, is a counter to Eurocentrism. Science, unfortunately, spread into the non-European world as part of the colonial baggage. For example, in India or South Asia, it came as part of the colonial empire.

You talk about how Greek knowledge spread worldwide through Islamic translations. Wasn’t the Islamic world carrying colonial baggage then?
I have built this background to talk about the essentialisation of science that is taking place today. Philosopher Seyyid Hossein Nasr actually came up with it in 1968-69. It didn’t pick up that much, but after the Islamic Revolution of 1979 in Iran, there was a sudden surge in the Islamic world. People felt this revolution would change things. In India, for example, parties like Jamaat-e- Islami were enthused by Ayatollah Khomeini’s call for Islamisation, though he stood for Shia Islam. They saw it as something that will change the Islamic world, however, it just ended up as a challenge to the longstanding Saudi control.

‘Ijtihad’ is free thinking. But free thinking must also be extended to politics and society. Isn’t it then detrimental to autocratic regimes like Saudi Arabia and Iran?
Of course, it is. That is why they want to control. Ijtihad is a challenge to taqleed or tradition. These are actually binaries. Ijtihad was not switched off suddenly. It took about two centuries before it was marginalised in Islam. And it was not only marginalised in the realm of science; it was marginalised in the realm of fiq or jurisprudence of Islamic intellectual realm, and replaced by taqleed. The cleric stronghold suddenly came up. Islam didn’t come into this world with any mosque or clerics commanding any special position. There was a book and there was Hadith (teachings of the Prophet). People were asked to read them and follow Islam. It remained like this for 150-200 years. Lots of things happened in the Islamic history after this.

Is the post 9/11 turmoil in the Islamic world a part of the conflict between religion and science?
To some extent, yes. This whole control of Wahhabism started in late 18th century. Saudis had their influence, but for the past 25-30 years, Saudi money and power have been used consciously to spread medieval Islam into all parts of the world. They have succeeded in propagating this monstrous phase to an extent that any deviation from this is seen as deviation from Islam.

What about Iran? While on the one hand, many women study in Iranian universities, on the other, some cannot leave house without male relatives.
Persian and Arab are two different traditions. There has been a conflict between them as they’ve had a totally different approach towards culture, life and world. Before 1979, Persian tradition was always strong in sciences, mathematics and physics. Now if you come in with repressive regimes or measures, you can put in some controls but that tradition cannot die. It has to continue, and it is continuing. There are large numbers of people who have migrated to Europe and America, many scientists, who were critical of this regime. There are about 67 percent women in Iranian universities, much more than men. This is a positive sign. This is also the difference between the Arabs and the Persian world. Both have restrictions, but still there is a difference. Persian women have access to universities, to modern subjects, sciences as well as social sciences.

Kunal Majumder is a Principal Correspondent with Tehelka. 

[also at: http://www.sacw.net/article2905.html]

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8. INDIA: DOES ART HAVE BOUNDARIES?
by Vatsala Vedantam
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(Deccan Herald, Oct 7, 2012)
If one state cannot tolerate persons from another, this country is far from becoming a “melting pot”.

Newspapers have carried two interesting stories and viewpoints recently. The first one comes from a far away country. It tells us that the Norwegian prime minister has appointed a Muslim woman from Pakistan as the new minister for Culture in Norway. The second one is nearer home and talks about eminent Kannada writers opposing a memorial for India’s one and only R K Narayan because he is not a Kannadiga.

While the first story conveys a deep sense of inclusiveness at a time when communal passions are riding high in the world, the second leaves us stunned by its narrow conviction that a writer who wrote in English has no place in the city that he loved and immortalised.

Read Mysore for Malgudi, and RKN immediately becomes a more loyal Kannadiga than anyone else. If the Town Hall, the Market place, Lawley Extension, the Sarayu river and the Memphi forest are not quintessential Mysore, what else are his novels all about?

To disown their creator would be disowning our own Kannada way of life.

Yes. R K Narayan was a Tamilian by birth who made English language his own. But so were Kannada’a greatest playwright, T P Kailasam, novelist Masti Venkatesha Iyengar, poets G P Rajaratnam and and P T Narasimhachar and many others who spoke in Tamil, studied in English and wrote in Kannada.

Why, our most renowned Kannada intellectuals like A N Moorthy Rao and L S Seshagiri Rao cut their teeth on English literature which they studied and taught before branching into Kannada writing. Moorthy Rao used to humourously describe Mysore in the 1930s, when there was a wave of Kannada revival in that city, with agitators shouting in English “Please speak in Kannada only!”

Not outsiders

When we see the number of Tamilians, Malayalis, Bengalis, Maharashtrians and Telegu speaking people in Karnataka, who have made significant contributions in various fields, who are ‘we’ to call them ‘outsiders’ or to deny them honours? If Raja Ramanna spoke in Tamil, studied in English and went on to become an international scientist in nuclear physics, have we not proudly claimed his achievements as ‘ours?’

Our best scientific institution was established by a Parsi. Our popular dance and music genres originated in Andhra and Tamil Nadu. Some of our literary gems were written in English.

The poet, essayist and translator AK Ramanujan who was a Tamilian born in Mysore, majored in English and migrated to America at the age of 30, where he lived and died, after an illustrious career as a scholar in Tamil, Telegu, Sanskrit and English. He is still revered as a son of Karnataka. Shall we deny them all honours when the world has recognised their genius?

Why, the first Kannada-English dictionary was produced in 1894 by a Christian missionary, Rev Kittel.  He was a scholar in Kannada who dedicated his life to studying Kannada literature, art and customs.

Should we obliterate his memory because he was a “foreigner”?  Or, throw away a painter of the staure of Yusuf Arrakkal because he is Malayali/Muslim? Our narrow boundaries have to give way to “boundlessness” if we desire our state to progress.

If one state cannot tolerate persons coming from another state in India, this country is far from becoming a “melting pot” like America where so many immigrants from so many countries and cultures have all come together to live in harmony.

When we consider the flow of people long ago from England, Ireland  and other European countries who came to the two Americas in search of a living  – added to the more recent rush of educated immigrants from Asian countries -  we may as well ask where are the original inhabitants of those great continents?

The native American Indian has become a small minority in his own land which has absorbed and assimilated so many languages, dialects and cultures. The Nobel Laureate Chandrashekar did not go unrecognised in the country of his adoption just because he was born in India.

Sweden gave him the highest scientific award, while America showered honours on him. Similarly, the mathematical genius of Ramanujan went unrecognised in his own country but hailed by mathematical societies world wide as a scientific marvel.

So, let us not grudge or deny recognition to an eminent writer simply because he was born in another state. On the other hand, we can prevail on our state government to award similar honours on Kannada writers and artists of eminence. We have had such abundance of talent, now and in the past.

Whether it is our rashtrakavi Kuvempu, theatre wizard Gubbi Veeranna, film maker Puttanna Kanagal, legendary sculptor Jakanacharya or even the 12th century mystic poet Akka Mahadevi – the state should feel proud to preserve and honour the rich heritage they have left behind.

 We must also learn to view all creative artists and geniuses through ‘a different mirror.’ Art has no boundaries or walls. It is a bridge where everyone should feel free to walk cross.

[also available at: http://communalism.blogspot.in/2012/10/does-art-have-boundaries-kannada.html ]

INTERNATIONAL

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9. USA: WHAT'S THE MATTER WITH CREATIONISM?
by Katha Pollitt
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(The Nation, July 2-9, 2012)
 
Do you know what the worst thing about the recent Gallup poll on evolution is? It isn’t that 46 percent of respondents are creationists (“God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last ten thousand years or so”). Or that 32 percent believe in “theistic evolution” (“Human beings have developed over millions of years from less advanced forms of life, but God guided this process”). Or that only 15 percent said humans evolved and “God had no part in this process.” It isn’t even that the percentage of Americans with creationist views has barely budged since 1982, when it was 44 percent, with a small rise in the no-God vote (up from 9 percent) coming at the expense of the divine-help position (down from 38 percent). Or that 58 percent of Republicans are creationists, although that does explain a lot.

It’s that the proportion of college graduates who are creationists is exactly the same as for the general public. That’s right: 46 percent of Americans with sixteen long years of education under their belt believe the story of Adam and Eve is literally true. Even 25 percent of Americans with graduate degrees believe dinosaurs and humans romped together before Noah’s flood. Needless to say, this remarkable demonstration of educational failure attracts little attention from those who call for improving our schools.

My brilliant husband, a sociologist and political theorist, refuses to get upset about the poll. It’s quite annoying, actually. He thinks questions like these primarily elicit affirmations of identity, not literal convictions; declaring your belief in creationism is another way of saying you’re a good Christian. That does rather beg the question of what a good Christian is, and why so many think it means refusing to use the brains God gave you. And yes, as you may have suspected, according to the Pew Research Center, evangelicals are far more likely than those of other faiths to hold creationist views; just 24 percent of them believe in evolution. Mormons come in even lower, at 22 percent, although official church doctrine has no problem with evolution.

Why does it matter that almost half the country rejects the overwhelming evidence of evolution, with or without the hand of God? After all, Americans are famously ignorant of many things—like where Iran is or when World War II took place—and we are still here. One reason is that rejecting evolution expresses more than an inability to think critically; it relies on a fundamentally paranoid worldview. Think what the world would have to be like for evolution to be false. Almost every scientist on earth would have to be engaged in a fraud so complex and extensive it involved every field from archaeology, paleontology, geology and genetics to biology, chemistry and physics. And yet this massive concatenation of lies and delusion is so full of obvious holes that a pastor with a Bible-college degree or a homeschooling parent with no degree at all can see right through it. A flute discovered in southern Germany is 43,000 years old? Not bloody likely. It’s probably some old bone left over from an ancient barbecue. To celebrate its fifth anniversary, the Creation Museum in Petersburg, Kentucky, has installed a holographic exhibit of Lucy, the famous proto-human fossil, showing how she was really just a few-thousand-year-old ape after all.

Patricia Princehouse, director of the evolutionary biology program at Case Western Reserve University, laughed when I suggested to her that the Gallup survey shows that education doesn’t work. “There isn’t much evolution education in the schools,” she told me. “Most have no more than a lesson or two, and it isn’t presented as connected with the rest of biology.” In fact, students may not even get that much exposure. Nationally, Princehouse said, at least 13 percent of biology teachers teach “young earth” creationism (not just humans but the earth itself is only 10,000 years old or thereabouts), despite laws forbidding it, and some 60 percent teach a watered-down version of evolution. They have to get along with their neighbors, after all. In Tennessee, home of the Scopes trial, a new law actually makes teaching creationism legal. “No one takes them to court,” Princehouse told me, “because creationism is so popular. Those who object are isolated and afraid of reprisals.” People tend to forget that Clarence Darrow lost the Scopes trial; until the Supreme Court ruled otherwise in 1968, it was illegal to teach evolution in public schools in about half a dozen states.

Kenneth Miller, a biology professor at Brown University and practicing Catholic who is a leading voice against creationism, agrees with Princehouse. “Science education has been remarkably ineffective,” he told me. “Those of us in the scientific community who are religious have a tremendous amount of work to do in the faith community.” Why bother? “There’s a potential for great harm when nearly half the population rejects the central organizing principle of the biological sciences. It’s useful for us as a species to understand that we are a recent appearance on this planet and that 99.9 percent of all species that have ever existed have gone extinct.” Evangelical parents may care less that their children learn science than that they avoid going to hell, but Miller points out that many of the major challenges facing the nation—and the world—are scientific in nature: climate change and energy policy, for instance. “To have a near majority essentially rejecting the scientific method is very troubling,” he says. And to have solidly grounded science waved away as political and theological propaganda could not come at a worse time. “Sea-level rise” is a “left-wing term,” said Virginia state legislator Chris Stolle, a Republican, successfully urging its replacement in a state-commissioned study by the expression “recurrent flooding.”

The group Answers in Genesis, which runs the Creation Museum, has plans to build a full-size replica of Noah’s Ark as part of its Ark Encounter theme park. If that “recurrent flooding” really gets going, you may wish you’d booked a cabin.
Katha Pollitt
June 14, 2012   


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South Asia Citizens Wire
Buzz for secularism, on the dangers of fundamentalism(s), on
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